absorb: preserve changesets which were already empty
Most commands in Mercurial (commit, rebase, absorb itself) don’t create empty
changesets or drop them if they become empty. If there’s a changeset that’s
empty, it must be a deliberate choice of the user. At least it shouldn’t be
absorb’s responsibility to prune them. The fact that changesets that became
empty during absorb are pruned, is unaffected by this.
This case was found while writing patches which make it possible to configure
absorb and rebase to not drop empty changesets. Even without having such config
set, I think it’s valuable to preserve changesets which were already empty.
$ hg init base
$ cd base
$ echo 'alpha' > alpha
$ hg ci -A -m 'add alpha'
adding alpha
$ cd ..
$ hg clone base work
updating to branch default
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd work
$ echo 'beta' > beta
$ hg ci -A -m 'add beta'
adding beta
$ cd ..
$ cd base
$ echo 'gamma' > gamma
$ hg ci -A -m 'add gamma'
adding gamma
$ cd ..
$ cd work
$ hg pull -q
$ hg merge
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)
Update --clean to revision 1 to simulate a failed merge:
$ rm alpha beta gamma
$ hg update --clean 1
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd ..